Job, A Masque for Dancing

Completed in 1930, Job, a Masque for Dancing is Vaughan Williams’ only major original dance work, and one of his orchestral masterpieces. Vaughan Williams disliked ballet as an art form, regarding it as over-stylized; and while Job does not replicate the multimedia “masque” entertainments of 16th-century Elizabethan England, its subtitle nonetheless emphasizes the work’s ritualistic and broadly paced approach to the dance medium. The scenario was based on a series of paintings by William Blake, depicting episodes from the biblical book of Job; this tells how God puts Job through a series of terrible personal trials to test his faith, which ultimately proves steadfast. Vaughan Williams always intended the music of Job to have a parallel life in the concert hall, and the first performance took place in this form at the 1930 Norwich Festival, while the stage premiere was given a year later at London’s Old Vic Theatre. The single-act, 45-minute score of Job presents the story in a sequence of nine tableau-like scenes of exceptional musical and imaginative range. To characterize Satan, the work’s only virtuoso dance role, Vaughan Williams deployed the modernist idiom of his middle-period style, unleashing passages of ferocious rhythmic power. This contrasts strikingly with the radiant strength of the music drawing on earlier English dance forms, such the opening “Saraband of the Sons of God” and the penultimate “Pavane of the Sons of the Morning.”